Maher Shalal Hash Baz, an experimental rock group from Japan headed by Tori Kudo, has a new LP “Hello NewYork” out on OSR Tapes. OSR Tapes is slated to cease operation this year, and this album is among their last releases.

Maher Shalal Hash Baz is a biblical name from Isaiah 8:3, meaning “hasten for spoil, hurry for plunder,” which The Lord requested as an inscription on “a large tablet in common characters.” (This, according to my copy of The New Oxford Annotated Bible.) Band leader Tori Kudo has discussed this and more elsewhere ( http://noise.as/html/kudo.html ). The band has been around since the 90s, but I come to this album as an outsider. I sat down and listened to it without having heard anything else of theirs.

Musically, the album bounces between rock vernaculars but maintains a cohesive spirit and sound—cheerful without ever being saccharine, with an edge of experimentalism, and a sense of collaboration. Indeed, “Hello NewYork” lists 19 musicians in its credits, and its population is tangible in the listening experience. The album feels free and spirited, like going on a walk and following your ears to a festival downtown.

“That’s All I Would Get” feels like the onset of a pleasant intoxication on a summertime stroll. As I was listening, I wasn’t sure if it was just me, or if the song gradually unwinds into slower and slower tempos. Glass percussion tinkles—as you listen to this album you don’t forget it’s a recording of something that happened in a room. It doesn’t feel claustrophobic or contained; on the contrary, it feels sunny and spacious.

“Dulce Juana,” a cover of The Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” begins with convivial clapping. Jolly brass playing enters and then escalates in intensity and overtakes the former. There is a great sense of motion through all of this.

In “Haarp,” vocalists Arrington de Dionyso and Christina Schneider sing back and forth like a philosophical dialectic, in the most lyrically meaty track of the album, with exchanges like the following:

“I will make politics cultural”“You cannot know the time provided”“Your son has already known it”“You cannot read a person’s mind.”

There is raw intellectual energy in these enigmatic statements, and this music seems to house it perfectly. The song ends abruptly, a harmonic door to nowhere, which yields into an afterthought of frenetic guitar playing. The energy of the song is physical too, and it swirls and is suspended. The next track, “Shiogamori,” opens with languid wailing like a drunken parade.

“Hello NewYork” is a lo-fi recording—it was recorded live in a room, on tape. Some lo-fi recordings aim to capture the allure of a live music-making experience; others, basement tapes, capture the allure of something private and DIY. In “Hello NewYork,” the lo-fi recording doesn’t point to a scene or reference a cult of personality. Instead, it portrays a spirit of experimentation that beckons listeners to listen more closely, not for technical wizardry but for the same thing that’s inspiring the musicians to play. Considering the way this record floats from one rock idiom to another, lingering in various locations, this album seems to be as much about rock music itself as anything else.

Other artists slap effects on their instruments to build an atmospheric sound or engineer shifts in emotion. In this album, you can sense the human participation behind the sounds. You can sense the bodies in space that are inherent in music, which are elsewhere obfuscated at times by technological choices or marketing pretense.

I have often found my own musical urges sidelined by pointless internal debates on whether my technical and songwriting abilities are good enough. Maybe the questions should be—can the music I make assemble people in a room? Can it host conversations? Does it contain multitudes? There’s something profoundly heartening about listening to an album like this, one that seems to affirm creativity and humanity without a hint of anything grandiose. Hasten, hurry—listen.

* * *

“Hello NewYork” is available to stream or download (https://osr-tapes.bandcamp.com/album/hello-newyork-lp-cd-osr60 ); or to buy on vinyl or CD (http://osr-tapes.com/ ).

Maher Shalal Hash Baz, an experimental rock group from Japan headed by Tori Kudo, has a new LP “Hello NewYork” out on OSR Tapes. OSR Tapes is slated to cease operation this year, and this album is among their last releases.

Bill Cushing looks at the strength and vulnerability of two of the most popular characters in the most sensational theatrical productions of all-time, Wolfram in Tannhauser and Eponine in Les Miserables.

Weird Al has been a well-known musician and parody songwriter for several decades, but it seemed like his last really big album was destined to be 1993’s ‘Bad Hair Day.’ Then something amazing happened. He announced that he would release one last full-length album in connection with eight, yes eight music videos coming out a day apart from each other.

If you want to get a sense of why You Talkin’ U2 to Me is the best Podcast, please visit the iTunes reviews for the new U2 album, Songs of Innocence. There you’ll find such gems as high-quality rock and roll music and excellent album, C+. It’s these sorts of in-jokes that make You Talkin’ U2 to Me so entertaining. Scott Aukerman and Adam Scott (Scott and Scott) treat their discussion of all things U2 more like a hangout, where two bros rhapsodize about their favorite albums from yesteryear.

The tribute album. It’s a great idea in theory, and a way to pay homage to a legendary artist, but usually the greatness stops there. The number of horrific tribute albums certainly outnumber the good ones, especially in the country genre, where the purveyors of pop country continue to commit atrocities against the songs of Nashville’s past. The latest EP from Shooter Jennings, Don’t Wait Up for George is not one of those albums. It’s a collection of two new Jennings-penned songs as well as three George Jones classics, and pays a loving tribute to The Legend.

Some artists refuse to let themselves be pigeon-holed by musical genres. Tom Freund is one of these artists. The former bassist for the Alt Country outfit The Silos keeps good company too—often collaborating with Ben Harper, who lends a guest vocal on the opening track “Angel Eyes”. “Angel Eyes” is a love song to life in L.A. It speaks of the city and her resilience. Despite reoccurring fires and earthquakes that plague the city there’s always a party somewhere. This track set the mood and a theme for the entire album.

Often when an album is released after more than a year and a half of anticipation, the payoff is lackluster, but Lazaretto lives up to the hype. This is Jack White’s second solo release, the follow up to 2012’s Blunderbuss (which was named the top album of that year by Drunk Monkeys). Like with Blunderbuss, he continues to move farther away from the minimalist approach that defined his work with The White Stripes and The Dead Weather.

Turn Blue, the latest release from the Akron, Ohio duo The Black Keys, might be their most sonically diverse album yet. The band’s usual straight-forward blues-inspired rock takes a backseat to something more interesting. This collection of songs rises above the “verse-chorus-verse”, radio friendly tracks on their previous albums.

There weren’t a lot of reasons to keep your radio turned on in 2013, until a 16-year-old New Zealander stormed the charts with a simple hook, ethereal backing vocals, and a giant middle finger to pop pomp and overproduction with her gorgeous single “Royals”.